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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the gay themes in the original Batman movies begin and end with close-ups of nipples and codpieces in Batman & Robin.

You’d be wrong, but I’m forgiving you now.

I decided early on that every time I post a new episode of my podcast, We Are Not Young Anymore, I wouldn’t necessarily post it to this blog, but in the past week, WANYA did a back-to-back twofer of Batman movies and why they’re pretty damn gay. That wasn’t necessarily the goal that Co-host Chris and I had in mind when we decided to talk about them, but that is where the conversation veered. I suppose we should have seen this coming.

First, there’s Batman Returns, which opened in theaters on June 19, 1992 — twenty-five years ago this Monday. In this episode of WANYA, Chris and I talk about how Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters gave Batman Returns the highest snappy comeback-to-dialogue ratio of any of Batman’s cinematic outings. The Penguin works as a gay analogue (as well as a Donald Trump analogue, and yes, I’m as surprised as anyone that it could be both), and then in a WANYA first, my roommate Glen makes a cameo in which he explains how Michelle Pfeiffer’s transformation in the film works as an extended metaphor for coming out, owning your sexuality and using it to defend yourself.

Tuesday marked the twentieth anniversary of the final film in the original series, Batman & Robin. Now, this is a movie that has been talked about a lot, especially since it changed the direction of comic book movies in general but also because it was released around the dawn of internet nerd culture. People really hated Batman & Robin, and I think that dismissal is largely justified because it’s simply not a good film, though I was happy to find that I loved Uma Thurman’s performance as Poison Ivy every bit as much as I did when I was a dopey fifteen-year-old who was still figuring stuff out.

However, a lot of the criticism of Batman & Robin smacks of homophobia, particularly when it’s being discussed by straight nerds who are angry that Joel Schumacher injected homoeroticism into a universe they saw as a sort of hetero safe space. In this episode, we talk about how Schumacher did not, in fact, pull those gay (and gayish) elements out of thin air, and how Thurman was correct in choosing to play Poison Ivy like a drag queen.

If you’ve been listening to our podcast so far, thank you very much for giving us your time and tolerating our dumb voices. I feel like seven episodes in, we’re getting the hang of this whole process, and I’m excited to burn through the 1992 and 1997 summer blockbuster seasons for the next few months. If you use iTunes to listen to podcasts, you can subscribe to We Are Not Young Anymore there. And if you’re really interested in our creative output, please give us a review. It’s helpful for us, and it also give you a chance to point out the ways we might be sucking.

In closing, I suppose I should apologize for not giving the infamous Bat-nipples much discussion at all. I guess we felt like more than enough had been said about them at this point, but it occurs to me now that Schumacher’s explanation about them being inspired by anatomical studies and classical statues seems disingenuous, because shouldn’t have Batgirl have had nipples too?